Building a planet friendly web – what we can do as developers
a talk by Chris Adams

You may have heard the quote “Software is eating the world” to describe how services like Airbnb, Uber, Slack and Skype are replacing the likes of hotels, taxis and the office commute. As software engineers, part of our job is accelerating this shift. And it’s easy to think that a shift from moving atoms, to moving bits, is a net win for the planet.

However, moving all those bits for our sites around takes servers. And these servers run on electricity. And most of this electricity powering our servers comes from burning fossil fuels. And burning these is a key driver of climate change – the kind of disruption we don’t want.

So, what can we do? We’re not going to stop sharing cat pics anytime soon, but we can change how we build online services to make them greener, load faster, and convert better, by borrowing existing techniques from web performance optimisation, containerisation, and serverless, as well as good old common sense.

This talk will show how we can use the tools in the python developer's toolbox today for more planet-friendly, sustainable web development, and how this is also good engineering practice.